Sarah Koval, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Music

Sarah’s research focuses on musical practices of everyday life, especially in the context of early modern Europe, with methodological commitments to material culture, the history of science, sound studies, and book history. Her current book project, Tuning the Body: Music and Health in Early Modern England, is a cultural history of music’s medicinal use in routines of bodily, spiritual, and household care in early modern England. This project takes stock of the personal music collections of individuals and households across England who gathered tunes alongside recipes for plague cures and pie, purchased printed song anthologies touting musical cures, and made music in daily rituals of household and bodily maintenance. With a rich and previously under-examined archival collection of music gathered in English recipe books, this project considers not only these books’ contents, but how they were read and used, the status of the music notation within them, and how disciplinary boundaries have partitioned their diverse musical, medicinal, and nutritional contents. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Harvard University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, Sarah was a Graduate Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and degrees in musicology and English literature from the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, Canada. Sarah serves as co-chair of the AMS Notation, Inscription, and Visualization Study Group.

Gender Studies -Related Research Interests: women's use of music in the home, women's musical literacy, women's networks of food and music exchange